3 cases tagged “first-degree murder”
Convicted: Jodi Ann Arias
When Travis Alexander's friends broke into his Mesa, Arizona home on June 9, 2008, the smell told them everything before their eyes could. He had been missing for five days. Inside the master bathroom, they found him crumpled in the shower: twenty-seven stab wounds, a throat slashed nearly to the spine, and a single .25-caliber bullet in his forehead. He was thirty years old. Within days, investigators had a name: Jodi Ann Arias, his ex-girlfriend, an aspiring photographer with a smile that charmed everyone she met. She would eventually confess to the killing, but not before telling two other stories first. What followed was one of the most-watched murder trials in American history, a 64-day courtroom spectacle broadcast live to millions, fueled by explicit text messages, recovered photographs of the victim alive in his shower just hours before his death, and a defendant who took the stand for 18 consecutive days and insisted she acted in self-defense. The jury didn't believe her. Neither did much of the country. She is serving life without parole. From a Nevada convention hall where two ambitious young people first locked eyes, to a prison cell in Goodyear, Arizona where Arias now sells artwork and writes a Substack blog, this is the full story of a killing that America could not look away from.
Convicted: Kimberly Michelle Hricko
On Valentine's Day 1998, guests at the Harbourtowne Golf Resort on Maryland's Eastern Shore laughed through a murder mystery dinner called 'The Bride Who Cried,' a campy audience-participation whodunit where everyone got to play detective. Somewhere in that dining room sat Kimberly Hricko and her husband Steven. By morning, one of them would be dead. Kimberly was a surgical technologist with direct access to succinylcholine, a muscle paralytic that stops breathing and metabolizes so quickly it leaves almost no trace in the body. She had spent months telling friends and coworkers, in precise and specific detail, exactly how she planned to kill her husband: inject him with the drug, set a fire, make it look like a drunken accident. She had even bought the cigars she intended to plant at the scene. When Steven's body was found burned in their hotel bed that night, Kimberly told investigators he must have fallen asleep drunk while smoking. But the autopsy refused to cooperate: no carbon monoxide in his blood, no soot in his airways, no alcohol in his system. Steven Hricko had already stopped breathing before the first flame was lit.
Convicted: Judias Anna Lou 'Judy' Buenoano
At 7:08 on the morning of March 30, 1998, a correctional officer at Florida State Prison threw the switch on the electric chair. The woman strapped into it, asked moments earlier if she had any final words, had answered only 'No, sir,' and closed her eyes. She was pronounced dead at 7:13 a.m. Her name was Judy Buenoano, and she had spent the previous evening watching a hunting and fishing show, eating chocolates, and reading a Mary Higgins Clark murder mystery. The neatness of that detail feels almost unbearable: a woman convicted of poisoning her husband, her son, and her boyfriend with arsenic, spending her last hours absorbed in fiction about someone else's crime. Prosecutor Russell Edgar had a name for her. He called her the Black Widow, a woman who 'fed off her mates and her young.' The evidence bore him out. Across nearly two decades, Buenoano is believed to have poisoned at least three people and built a life on their insurance payouts. She never confessed. She maintained her innocence to the end, eyes shut, silent in the chair. This is the story of how she got there.
